


Leviathan

by Rebecca Hb (beckyh2112)



Category: Atomic Robo - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beckyh2112/pseuds/Rebecca%20Hb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>OSU requests Atomic Robo's assistance in a simple underwater expedition. Which means no lightning guns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leviathan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tiriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiriel/gifts).



A lightning gun can kill anything with a pulse, and most things without one. Atomic Robo has proved this again and again over his lifetime. Unfortunately, lightning guns are the least ideal weapon for underwater action science ever yet invented.

***

"It won't be a problem," Lang said when she went over the equipment list. "This isn't an intervention in some weird science disaster, Robo. This is a request by OSU to assist with an underwater geosurvey, due to your-"

"Because I don't need to breathe," he said, glowering at the same equipment list. "Look, I agree with the theory, but practical experience has shown we need weapons when we go on missions. We're action scientists. We attract action."

"OSU would really like to avoid anything that could damage the survey ship or kill the crew. They were very explicit about us not bringing any lightning guns."

"Fine. No lightning guns."

***

"No lightning guns?" Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan asked as he stowed his gear aboard ship. The brunette oceanographer and ex-astronaut officially led the mission. From the few minutes he'd spent with her so far, Robo figured she led a lot like he did - from the middle of the action.

He slitted his optics at her. "OSU was pretty specific about that."

"We were. That doesn't mean we thought you'd listen." She smiled. "You've read the material?"

"Hey," he protested, "I listen to these things!" He tucked the end of his duffel bag into the underbunk storage-chest, studiously keeping a straight face at the quiet clank it made. "Of course I have. We're doing an underwater geophysical survey of the Kerguelen Plateau and Broken Ridge. There's some interesting anomalies from your previous survey you want to investigate via submarine and atomic-powered robot."

"Quite. We're using very cutting-edge equipment for this."

"I don't know, I hear they've had atomic-powered robots since the 1920s."

She laughed. That was a good sign.

***

"This is not a good sign," Robo says.

"What? What's going on down there, Robo?"

He ignores the demands of the submarine team and swims a bit closer to the giant squid floating lifelessly in the water. It's glowing. It's glowing and _there are chunks ripped out of it_. If it's not a zombie, he's going to eat **someone's** hat.

This close, he can see the little fish nibbling on the insides of an empty eye-socket bigger than his fist. Wow. That's astonishingly gross.

The only warning he gets is the sudden drop in light-level. It comes almost simultaneously with the skinless tentacle trying to grab him. The grab is pretty clumsy, even by the standards of zombies. Probably whatever is controlling the squid doesn't understand how to work its nervous system properly.

Robo cuts his propellers for a moment, dropping underneath the tentacle. It takes less than a microsecond to cut them back on and jet towards the squid. He pulls back his fist, punches like he's been practicing since they first let him dive-

"Agh! It's full of necrotic goo!"

"What?" Dr. Sullivan demands over the radio. " _What_ is full of necrotic goo?!"

A tentacle slams into his side, knocking him away from the rotting arms. The blow resets his gyros, and for a moment, he loses track of which way was up. Then another tentacle comes lashing towards him, and he grabs on. Up and down can be sorted out later. Zombie squid now.

"Atomic Robo!"

He squints his optics at the thing. No, wait, that's the radio. "Kinda busy, Dr. Sullivan!"

"With _what_?!"

"Zombie! Zombie squid!"

***

Dr. Sullivan facepalms. She should have expected this, she thinks. Sure, there are plenty of Tesladyne investigations that don't go tits up in weirdness, but this time, they were investigating a sunken microcontinent. That was just _begging_ for trouble.

"Help me get into my aquanaut suit," she orders.

***

Tentacles wrap around Atomic Robo, one trying to rip his leg off. He punches and scrabbles at them, trying not to cringe at the gunk getting on his hands. You're water-tight, he reminds himself. If the saltwater can't get in, the necrotic goo can't either.

A particularly violent wrench on his leg makes him growl, "It would take a power screwdriver and more time than you've **got** left."

The squid tries to bash him against its head. It's like hitting a brick wall - it hurts a heck of a lot and Robo goes through part of it anyway.

"Gah! That wasn't encouragement to try something new!"

The squid plucks him out of its gore and swings him out as far as it can. Robo digs his fingers into its flesh, shredding zombie flesh as it yanks him back in for another meet-and-greet with its head. The tentacle parts just in time, and Robo twists to slam his boots into the squid. He sinks in up to his knees, but he can grab the next tentacle grabbing for him instead of being grabbed by it.

"Robo! Get out of the way!"

He's already redirecting the turbines to jet him away from the squid before he consciously registers Dr. Sullivan's shout came on a slightly different frequency than the one she used with the submarine. Then a maser smashes into the squid.

The one good thing about being underwater is monsters don't splatter as widely as they normally do.

"Bleh."

"You said it," he says, twisting towards the back-trail of the maser. "-what the hecking heck?"

Dr. Sullivan grins behind the faceplate of her... diving suit. It's a flash of teeth as polarization fades from the probably-not-glass. The rest of it looks like something an astronaut would wear, though, at a glance, it looks like the materials are more suited to withstanding high pressures. Cradled in her hands, she holds a rifle designed to work with clumsy gloves.

"This is the OSU aquanaut suit," she says. "It's mostly my design, but everyone in the science departments likes to tinker with it. The maser I liberated from one of our grad students."

He squints at the rifle. "I did see light when you fired it. Guidance?"

"Precisely. Experiments found we needed visual feedback in order to aim properly."

He nods and slowly turns himself in a circle. "You want to continue this dive-"

Out in the far darks, there are lights coming on.

"- no," she says in a small voice. "I think-"

"- we're going to need reinforcements."

"Oh yes."

***

It takes two weeks to get together the kind of reinforcements that make both Atomic Robo and Dr. Sullivan happy. During that time, Tesladyne and OSU turn out half a dozen more aquanaut suits, including one especially sized for Jenkins. Robo insists.

When they get back to the Kerguelan Plateau, there are no glowing zombie squid to be found.

"Crap," Atomic Robo says succinctly.

"What have we got on the scanners?" Dr. Sullivan demands, and there's a flurry of sounds over the radio.

Then, one of the grad students comes back and says in a tentative voice, "Ma'am? Atomic Robo? Um. Part of the Broken Ridge has gone missing."

***

"Never a good sign when part of the landscape goes missing." Atomic Robo peers at the instruments. "Is there some sort of- trail? Do you even do trails underwater?"

"Particle trail." Dr. Sullivan leans over and taps one of the screens. "Stephanie, do a wide-angle, high-powered scan with the missing area of Broken Ridge as the point of origin. Look for dirt particulates where they shouldn't be."

"That's going to take a lot of processing power, ma'am."

"Which we're not going to need until we figure out what the problem is. Do it."

Two hours later, Stephanie and several others find a particle trail heading in the general direction of Australia. Stephanie beams with pride as she announces these findings, and Robo just makes a mental note of another human who isn't focusing on the most important problem here. It's a common problem in Tesladyne.

"It could be heading almost anywhere," Dr. Sullivan points out. "There's nothing requiring it to travel only in straight lines."

Robo shakes his head. "Everything else is even farther now that it's started in that direction. We have to assume Australia until we've got a reason otherwise."

"The oceans around Australia are a very rich biosphere," she admits.

"-I was thinking mobile underwater base, not hungry sea-monster."

"Could be both," Jenkins says.

***

Whatever it is, they're gaining on it. The particle trail gets thicker and thicker, and the lack of other ocean life gets worrisome to the oceanographers and biologists.

They're within sight of Perth when they finally get within sight of _it_.

Unfortunately, this is because it's attacking Perth.

"- Preliminary hypothesis?" Robo asks, peering out at the whale-like thing lunging out of the ocean and heaving itself across bits of the city. Tentacles grab onto skyscrapers as it pulls itself forward.

"Not a damn clue." Dr. Sullivan lowers her binoculars. "It looks like some sort of deranged cetacean-like lungfish. Or lungfish-like cetacean. Six of one, half a dozen of the other."

Robo checks the charge on his maser. Since he had expected an underwater adventure, all the lightning guns are back in New York. He's going to have to make it policy to always bring one on an expedition. "How do you like your fish?"

" _Blackened._ "

***

The masers don't work as well as Robo would like. They fry the monster pretty nicely, but it's just too damn **big**. It's like the fight in Egypt, only with higher collateral damage.

He hates collateral damage.

"Got any ideas?" he yells over the radio to Dr. Sullivan. "Another minute, and I'm going to try to find the thing's heart."

Jenkins leaps past him and stabs his maser into what they tentatively think is an eye. It squelches, then he pulls the trigger and it just burns.

"That sounds disgusting," Dr. Sullivan replies.

Robo isn't sure if she means him going trekking through its body or what Jenkins just did.

"I do have an idea," she says. "You notice it's still hauling itself out of the ocean?"

"Bit too busy for that!"

"-Just try to get out of the way. RAMMING SPEED, CAPTAIN."

***

OSU's boat is completely ruined. The Australian government isn't very pleased, but they do agree things could have been worse and it probably wasn't Atomic Robo or the American government's fault.

The thing does taste pretty good blackened, according to Dr. Sullivan.

All in all, Atomic Robo chocks it up as a success for action science.

  
**-End-**   


**Author's Note:**

> [Kathryn D. Sullivan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_D._Sullivan) is a real person, though her portrayal here is entirely fictional. The [Kerguelen Plateau](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Plateau) is a real place, though I played fast and loose with everything else about it.


End file.
